Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940

Iconic Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) created striking artworks that were a visual diary of a lifetime of physical and emotional pain and her turbulent marriage to fellow artist Diego Rivera. A polio survivor, Kahlo was gravely injured in a bus accident at age 18, and began painting in bed during her year-long convalescence. Kahlo suffered through 30 subsequent operations and a partial amputation of her right leg. She expressed much of her anguish through penetrating self-portraits that were intentionally Naïve, and filled with the bright colors and flattened forms of the Mexican folk art she adored. During her lifetime, Kahlo created more than 200 paintings, drawings and sketches, and was the first woman to sell a painting to the world-renowned Louvre Museum in Paris.